Version 5 of KDE Frameworks is nearing completion

Conclusions

The developers of KDE Frameworks 5 seem to be on the right track. The libraries are platform-independent, leaner, and more modular. Programmers can also selectively pick out the frameworks that their program needs and no longer need to deliver a bunch of unused libraries. All Qt and KDE developers will benefit from transferring the ownership of the source code to the Qt project. They will also benefit from the standardized development guidelines and tools that use a style similar to Qt.

However, KDE Frameworks 5 still comprises more than 50 individual components through which developers must navigate. The division into types and tiers confuses rather than helps – a simple list of all the existing libraries and their dependencies would be clearer and more meaningful. According to Aleix Pol, however, two reasons speak for these classifications: "They helped us in communicating and gave us a picture of where things were going. In addition, nobody wanted to list the dependencies of KIO" [19] (see Figure 3).

On the second day of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Gnome and KDE developers have been focused on topics surrounding meta data, community, and infrastructure. Concerning multimedia, audio support for the open source desktop has proved to be a hot topic.